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A Year Ago Today…

I wrote the following stream-of-consciousness on my Facebook a few days ago and I gave it some thought and decided that it should live here on my blog as well.

A year ago today, I shot Sia‘s wedding in Palm Springs. It was a day with wicked weather that started with heavy rain and lightning bolts that threatened flash floods through the desert resort town. It all seemed so sudden and strange at the time, but I suppose that is what I’ve come to understand about life. I will never be able to share most of those photos out of respect for privacy, but I know deep down that it’s something great that I did. I think about the past year and the path I’ve been on since I started my photography business some years back and it all seems so wild. I have a kind of duality about me: I can be so candid and earnest about things, but then so bashful and undermining of my own efforts. I find this duality rather annoying at times and I promise you I work on equalizing these extremes everyday. But starting this small photography business has been a kind of saving grace for me. A lot gets revealed when you go through the process of building something. I have learned so much about myself (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and what happens when you work hard on something you really care about. Every day is a hard push forward into the unknown and I have had to learn to embrace that. Corey told me once to “just accept the chaos”, which was his nice way of saying to me “relax, it’ll be okay” during one of my existential meltdowns. But, it’s true you know, if you build it, they will come, and until then, just accept the chaos. Start planting your seeds while you can.

It’s always tough writing such reflections on such an open forum like Facebook and Instagram (already so much politicking, cute animal videos, and general joking to consume instead), but for some reason that never seems to stop me. I can’t help it (no matter how much I make myself cringe), I have a urgency for honesty that needs to be satiated every so often, even if it’s just me adding a little blip to the high-speed ticker tape of information that is social media. These days I am more and more interested in being transparent and exercising vulnerability, especially since the virtual world has so many veils of simulated reality to decode and digest. I write these things down, not as some motivational speech (c’mon now), but more as an open-mouthed whisper to myself. A impulse from this time and space that I can mirror back and examine. I guess what I’m trying to say is, being compulsively open is just who I am, and I think it would be a disservice to deny it. So, here’s to another year of doing and reflecting, and pushing for urgent honesty all the while through it.